The Vault Beneath the Sand

BlackSand Warrior Gauntlet

---

The sound of chainsaws was not native to the BlackSand. It was foreign. Ungainly. No grace. No purity of form.

Jabir of the Waste watched through narrow eyes, one hand resting on the skull of Master Alhuan, the other wrapped neatly around the edge of his chair. He never leaned forward. He didn’t need to. Shadows leaned for him.

Below, the two combatants squared off. One gleamed like prophecy, the other like punishment.

Justice Hacker of the Dawn, clad in skylord plate, moved with the caution of memory. Deeper than calculation. Slower than rhythm. Memory. His chainsaw whispered in low, broken syllables. No roar, no plea, just the mutter of a priest who had forgotten how to pray.

And across from him… Edge. The machine was an affront to the arena’s spirit. Too clean. Too built. A brute forged from ambition’s alloy, untouched by experience.

Alhuan’s skull pulsed once, low green flame casting faint light on Jabir’s lap.

“He reeks of false form,” the skull murmured. “It’s not the false ones that concern me,” Jabir whispered. “It’s the ones who forget they’re real.”

The crowd’s noise rolled past him like mist. He did not hear the words, only the tone. Bloodlust. Confusion. Crude worship.

Verus roared the opening. Jabir did not flinch. The first clang of steel. Edge’s blade. Followed by the gentle scrape of saw teeth against synthetic flesh.

No blood. No gasp. Just the sound of inevitability deflecting effort.

The skull of Alhuan tilted slightly, its green tether humming. Jabir followed the machine’s movements, then Justice’s. Then paused.

There. That moment. Not when Edge struck. When he recalculated.

“Too perfect,” Jabir murmured. “Scripted,” Alhuan agreed. “What lesson does this one offer?”

Jabir studied Justice’s approach. Adaptive where elegance would fail, persistent without haste. He watched the chainsaw catch. Not on flesh, but on memory.

He watched the fighter with no name step forward, not to finish the kill, but to confirm it.

“He’s not chasing victory,” Jabir said. “He’s chasing memory.”

The skull flickered, amused. “That makes him dangerous.” “No,” Jabir said. “That makes him unfinished.”

And then, Edge fell. It wasn’t elegant. There was no grand collapse, no cinematic tumble. Just a machine shutting down. A puppet whose strings had been cut mid-motion.

Justice did not raise his arms. He did not speak. He only left. Perfect.

“That one’s will was forged after the wound,” Jabir murmured. “Not before.”

The medics moved in. So did two engineers, likely from the Vaulted Spires, come to scavenge whatever tech survived the kill. Jabir gave them no glance.

Instead, he lifted one finger. The signal.

From the far shadow beneath the royal box, the Onyx Wolf emerged. Silent. Unseen by the crowd, unheeded by the engineers.

It followed the medics at a distance.

Edge’s body would be escorted to the infirmary. What was left of it. But not before a detour. Not before the Vault.

Jabir remained still, but the skull beside him glowed brighter.

The audience roared the champion’s name. But Jabir watched only the trail of smoke from the chainsaw.

The match had ended minutes ago. The roar of the arena still lingered in the wind, bouncing off ancient walls like a ghost that hadn’t yet learned it was dead.

But here, in the Vault beneath the BlackSand, the air was different. Cooler. Still. Tasting faintly of ash and chalk and centuries of quiet horror.

Edge’s body lay on a ritual slab. A space meant for transformation, not utility. The difference mattered.

Jabir stood a pace away. He did not bring a retinue. He did not speak to the engineers who had wheeled the machine here. They had already left. None of them saw the Onyx Wolf shadowing the extraction, or the way it paused just before entering, then vanished between breaths. Now it stood behind Jabir, still as carved obsidian.

The skull of Alhuan hovered beside the necromancer, pulsing a slow rhythm in emerald light. It drifted in slow rotation over the machine’s remains. Not reverence. Assessment.

“There is no soul,” Alhuan said. “Only repetition. Pattern without presence.” Jabir tilted his head. “But repetition is a kind of echo.”

He raised one hand, palm open. Thin silver rings glinted faintly beneath his sleeves.

A circle of runes ignited beneath the slab. Not fire. Not magic. Memory. The kind that adheres to bone, to metal, to weapons used in rage.

The slab wasn’t reading the corpse. It was listening to what had stayed behind.

The frame of Edge still held heat. Not from blood. He had none, but from purpose. From effort. Jabir didn’t care about circuits. He cared about intent.

He closed his eyes and waited.

The silence deepened. The green from Alhuan’s skull bent around the edges of the machine’s remains. Like cold heat curling off stone.

Then...

A flicker.

Buried deep in the alloy, there it was. A flash of will. Not identity. Programming too stubborn to die.

Jabir opened his eyes. “Not a soul,” he whispered. “But something adjacent.”

He stepped closer. Held his palm just above the machine’s chest.

From the rune circle, a dozen fine threads of pale green light extended. Not pulling, not extracting. Tempting. Coaxing whatever still believed it was alive.

The Onyx Wolf let out a low, nearly inaudible growl. Not fear. Recognition.

The threads touched the machine’s inner core. And sparked.

The skull of Alhuan hissed. “Resistant,” the voice said. “That spark refuses to mean anything.”

Jabir didn’t argue.

Instead, he reached for a different rune, one carved into the inside of his wrist. A simple symbol. A hook. The Rune of Calling.

He whispered its true name.

The green threads sharpened. Became spears. One pierced through Edge’s chest cavity and stopped, just as the machine’s arm jerked.

No awareness. No awakening. Just reflex.

The thing remembered it had been struck. And in that memory, Jabir found his opening.

He whispered a word so old it cracked the dust on the floor.

The green threads pulled. Not forcefully. With precision. With care.

From the cavity, a thin silver haze emerged. A directive, not a soul. A fragment of mission.

Jabir caught it in a crystal phial, sealed it with wax made of pressed ash and bone-oil, and tucked it inside the folds of his robe.

“What will you do with it?” Alhuan asked. Jabir looked at the faint trail still rising from the corpse. “Nothing,” he said. “Yet.”

The skull pulsed once. Then they left. The Onyx Wolf padding ahead, the dead air closing behind them like a curtain being drawn.

The corridor that led back to Jabir’s sanctum was carved of old basalt, stone older than the city itself. Each step echoed, less with sound than with consequence.

The Onyx Wolf padded ahead, invisible now to any eye that did not know its rhythm. Alhuan’s skull hovered beside him, its green light dimmed but focused. Still spinning from the last examination.

“You ignored the victor,” the skull said. “I did not,” Jabir replied. “I deferred him.” “Edge had no soul. Yet you still reached into his shell.” “I study patterns. Not personalities.”

The skull made no sound, but Jabir felt its judgment anyway.

He reached the end of the hall. The one where the flame of the arena could still be seen through a narrow slit in the stone.

Justice Hacker of the Dawn was walking off the field. The chainsaw at his side, dragging smoke and silence in equal measure. He didn’t lift his hands. Didn’t accept the crowd’s praise. He walked like a man leaving a funeral.

“That one,” Jabir murmured, “is louder when quiet.” “Explain.” Jabir didn’t turn his gaze. “I’ve seen men scream to mask their fear. Others laugh to cover hate. But that one says nothing because he’s waiting to see who flinches first.”

“You think he is broken?” Jabir narrowed his eyes. “I think he is braced.”

There was no flair in Justice’s kill. No flourish. Even in mercy, it had the weight of necessity. As if he wasn’t fighting a machine… but the idea of one.

Cold. Mechanical. Without memory. Justice fought with memory.

Jabir had seen the way his hand hovered over the chainsaw. A gesture born from ritual. The way he placed the sword across the fallen machine’s chest.

He had known warriors like that before. Once. In the Waste. Before the Tome. Before the skull. Before the silence.

“He fears what he could become,” Jabir said aloud. The words surprised even him.

“Fear,” Alhuan replied, “makes poor servants.” “Yes,” Jabir said. “But excellent weapons.”

A tremor ran through the green light of the skull. From the window, the last glimpse of Justice vanished into shadow.

Jabir turned. No decision was made aloud. But he had already chosen.

The chamber behind Jabir was cold. It refused warmth. Its walls drank light. Its air held still. The only movement came from the soft spin of the skull.

Verus stood by the door, arms crossed. Silent. He had returned with the match’s conclusion. Said nothing, as always.

But Jabir could smell the question in his breath.

“Let the medics do their work,” Jabir said. Verus gave a slow nod and turned away.

Jabir remained at the center of the chamber. He extended one hand, palm open. The skull of Master Alhuan floated toward him, obedient as ever.

A circle of runes ignited across the floor. Pale green symbols etched long ago in powdered bone and salt. Faint, but functional.

From beneath his robes, Jabir withdrew a small sliver of broken steel. Barely the length of a finger, but dense with heat, stained with static. Edge’s collar spine, broken free during the final strike. A splinter of something once meant to be invincible.

He placed it in the center of the circle. The skull hovered above it.

“This will not teach me what I need,” Alhuan said. “The machine had no soul.” “No,” Jabir agreed. “But it was designed by something that does.”

He extended his fingers, brushing over the shard. Faint pulses, like echoes of synthetic thought, still twitched in its memory.

Jabir closed his eyes.

The whisper of Justice’s chainsaw filled his ears again. Its rhythm. The refusal to rush. The readiness to wait.

He fights like someone listening to a storm he cannot stop. “Curious,” Jabir murmured.

The skull flared gently. “You admire him.” Jabir’s lips didn’t move. But the thought was true.

He opened his eyes. “He is not the strongest. Nor the fastest. But he survived.”

The Onyx Wolf stepped from the dark. Its paws made no sound. It looked toward the circle, then toward Jabir. It then sat, tail curled in ritual stillness.

The green light dimmed slightly. “Should I mark him?” Alhuan asked.

Jabir didn’t answer. He wasn’t ready.

Instead, he knelt by the circle and whispered a phrase. Soft, precise.

“The soul that breaks in silence is the one I will study.”

The room shuddered as the runes sealed again.

Edge was dead. But Justice Hacker of the Dawn had left a question behind. Jabir now intended to find the answer.

Entered by: 0x6424…79B4